Budget-minded turbocharged heads: Vortec or L98?

[Guest POKINATCHA]

I was kicking around ideas for a possible fairly low budget SBC turbo project, and was wondering whether the better flow and combustion chanber shape of the Vortec heads would offset the inherent advantage(as far as detonation goes) of aluminum heads. While I know that the L98 heads are far from the aluminum head of choice, they are among the most affordable alternatives. I was leaning toward the Vortec heads for a number of reasons, one of which being the purported problems the L98 heads have with cracking under high cylinder pressures. So, while I would really lean toward the Vortec heads, since iron heads have shown they can work in turbo engines (i.e. GN heads), is the L98 'Vette head's a,uminum design a large enough advantage to ignore its other shortcomings?

[mobythevan]

I don't see why the vortec heads are not a good choice for a budget turbo engine. There is one way to find out, so I bought a multi port injection manifold (see other post) and I am going to put together a turbo setup with the vortec heads and a hydraulic flat tappet cam around 450 lift. I am interested to see what performance can be had from this "cheaper" setup. Two things at least come up, one being the iron head so maybe lose a little compression before pre-detonation. The other is 64cc combustion chamber so you need to run something like 22cc to 26cc dish piston for turbo friendly static compression. The only thing that was holding me up was finding a multi port injection manifold, so I bought one of these iron marine types off ebay and now its time to start the engine build.